Cold Thunder: Balemorale Castle

Cold Thunder — An audience at last

Richard finally brings the long-delayed audience with Victoria within reach. At Termina Temple, he promises to escort the Hero, Tara and their companions to Balemorale, the royal summer estate. Skye has specifically requested that its emissary meet the Queen there. Richard recalls King Duncan’s attempted conquest and the death of a Champion of Energy, while acknowledging that his grasp of the history needs sharpening. This is already a diplomatic confrontation before the Hero reaches the court.

The Temple’s earlier introductions have already established Celestia’s household and the guards sent by Gravelyn. Its quieter optional work shows what the refuge can become. In Good Company, the Hero spars with eight defenders who have taken no vows of allegiance; Celestia teaches them in exchange for their service. The Sky Opens sends letters to eight dragons in Etherwardes. Celestia’s former charges recognize her signature and spread the word to their brethren, creating an information network that may also bring hungry visitors to the Temple.

At Balemorale, Tara has waited months to question her sister about Undine, the slaughter of the Ashray Elves and Sparagmos. She believes Victoria has been avoiding them; Richard describes a ruler exhausted by competing demands, frightened subjects and the Empire’s threat. Estrangement makes the impasse concrete. Nialla will not admit even the Queen’s friend and sister to her private chambers, so their questions must be raised in a crowded conference. Celestia also wants answers about the former court mages Victoria may have pardoned for their knowledge.

Cold Thunder — Guests beneath suspicious eyes

Balemorale’s hospitality reveals how far Greenguard’s fear has spread. Zhoom accompanies Samba and the Water Elf Durance partly to keep them safe from their hosts. He says thousands of Elves have sought shelter under a Half-Elf Pharaoh, even though the desert harms their constitutions. Camlan’s alliance with the Shadows has become a pretext to mistreat Elves across the continent. Crulon, now Chief Lector, wants the Sandsea to serve its people rather than its ruler; he also hints that Zhoom’s claim to the throne is stronger than they first understood. Neither explains that lineage here.

Durance represents the Water Elves of the coasts, rivers and lakes. He says their elders learned from a human man and an unfamiliar Elven woman that the Ashray were killed and their Temple taken. In his account, Neso’s claim that she had hidden them for protection concealed her shame at being abandoned. Durance has been grabbed and accused of spying throughout the visit. The scene does not make him a spokesman for Camlan: his anger is that humans refuse to distinguish the different Elven peoples.

Samba has come in Sokrakiis’s place, with an invitation the Knights nearly ignored. Aquella was her friend; a dress intended for her next visit now marks an absence Samba fears is permanent. Bloodtusk’s Trolls want an explanation, while the Horcs have barricaded their own side of the Ravine. Kagg gives Samba their concerns rather than risk a messenger being attacked for being a Horc. Her presence joins a private grief to the fear that Greenguard may turn its strength against its neighbors.

Ai No Miko arrives with a proposed alliance, not a willingness to ignore Undine. She and Zhoom are concerned about the Empire’s designs on the Isles and the Sandsea, but she will judge cooperation with Victoria after hearing the Queen’s explanation. The Isles are beginning to reconcile Yokai and humans after her return, yet Greenguard’s nobles regard their visitor as either a danger or an asset. Miko still values a friend who can see the same person beneath her changed standing.

The apparently pleasant Skye emissary Lieber invites the Hero to walk on the beach. He describes Queen Iona as the Mother of Orphans and the silent Warden of East Skye as her adopted son, whom Lieber is supposed to protect. Only Elves may be nobles in his account; he presents himself as a useful human intermediary. The Warden briefly recognizes the Hero but refuses to speak. Meanwhile Crulon feels unnatural cold gathering around a summit that contains three rulers. His warning is rebuffed by guards who are more suspicious of the visitors than of the weather.

Cold Thunder — Who governs the Queen

Lord Henry Vaughn III thanks the Hero for saving Chiral Valley, a part of the territory he was forbidden to defend. Alteon placed houses that had supported Dethrix under restrictions, despite Henry’s hatred of the king whose actions killed his brothers. He now resents the Lightguard’s influence and works with Seraphic Paladins to limit it. One Seraphic liaison speaks of other orders being enticed into merger, then denies knowing the Hero despite a familiar voice. The denial remains a clue, not an established identity.

Astero offers the opposite account of the same growth. The Lightguard’s losses and Lynaria’s death left grieving Paladins in need of guidance, and the Queen’s support now lets them hunt the Shadows proactively. He says even a summons from Celeritas would not make him abandon them. He also reports that Varga received a private audience denied to other guests, warning that her growing authority as a Goddess of War may be an omen. These are Astero’s descriptions of the Order and its rivals, rather than proof that the Lightguard’s every action serves the innocent.

Lord Granville makes the pressure for conquest explicit. He disparages his daughter and Victoria, praises the Hero as the child he wishes he had, and claims that a golden age requires a nation of warriors to act. Dwarfhold and Bloodtusk, in his view, need no further cooperation, while Darkovia should not be tolerated. He admits helping fund Undine and wants its inventions put to use against necromancy. Laidronette Cavendish describes this faction as families enriched by war, distinct from those who prefer to preserve their luxury by doing nothing.

Laidronette’s own family is ostracized because her mother married a commoner. Marigold and Henry are punished socially for their fathers’ loyalties, and Song finds Marigold drenched by a suspiciously placed bucket of mop water. Song recognizes the court’s cruelty from Astravia and admits her own part in poisoning its politics. Yet she is also grateful to Victoria for sheltering and forgiving her family. Brentan has entered through the kitchens to avoid stirring the faction that still wants him crowned; he hopes to visit Alteon’s and Brittany’s graves with Victoria before continuing his travels. Personal gratitude and affection do not make these allies agree about the crown.

Cold Thunder — All talk, never answers

Richard opens the conference, and Miko speaks first. News of the Empire’s plans immediately provokes demands for arms, accusations against Gravelyn and calls for more Lightguard donations. Zhoom’s offer of an alliance meets insults about Elves and the Sandsea. When Durance demands an explanation for the dead Ashray and the occupied Water Temple, nobles threaten arrest and collective punishment. The Hero trusts Song’s promise of secrecy about Undine, so the leak remains unexplained here.

Tara breaks through the uproar and demands that Victoria answer. The Queen says she did not know the Ashray had been killed: she was told only that the Elves were already gone when she visited. She calls accepting that explanation a mistake and says she would not have accepted the Temple had she known. Tara’s relief lasts only until the next question. Asked whether she has cut ties with the perpetrators, Victoria suggests a few bad actors may have operated without the organization’s knowledge and promises a joint investigation with its patrons.

The court rejects even the prospect of restitution. Victoria argues that Greenguard cannot face the Empire without its partners or dismiss an entire organization over a few offenders. Tara rejects this as an excuse for working with murderers: justice owed indefinitely is not justice delivered. The Hero describes what happened to Aquella and warns that tolerating it will lead Victoria further astray. The Queen ends the argument rather than settling it. The disagreement concerns her present choices as well as what she knew when she accepted Undine.

Lieber intervenes with apparent courtesy, echoing Tara’s insistence that justice should not wait. He notes that Skye is mostly Elven and questions its welcome. Victoria apologizes, thanks Skye for help during the coastal calamity, adjourns the conference and grants him the promised private meeting. Tara asks to be left alone. Henry then offers the Hero and Celestia a tour of the castle, turning the failed audience into an opportunity to learn what the court has kept below it.

Cold Thunder — What the cellar keeps

Henry first has the Hero shake off the Paladins following them and find a cellar key through sparring with the nobles’ Knights. Their notes betray an interest in the visitors; the key belongs to one of Granville’s men. In Cellar Secrets, Brentan is called back before leaving the castle, and the group opens the door near Astero’s gathering. Henry’s subjects had seen a blond woman with spectacles surveying Chiral Valley under royal guard and ordering that her research be brought back to Balemorale and that the Knights mind the Vessel. This report points to the investigation without establishing every detail of her movements.

The cellar contains Chaos-tainted spiders, crystals and research records. Song recognizes Noelle’s work: these are experiments intended to discover how to destroy Chaos permanently. Henry initially finds that purpose reassuring, then takes the crystals’ fragility as a reason to think Chaos may no longer require dangerous study. The tasks clear the cellar and gather its books; they do not prove his general conclusion about Chaos. Song expects Victoria to seek another scholar now that Noelle is gone.

Marigold supplies a longer history. Her father Reignolds served Dethrix alongside Ryder, Bligh, Fitzroy, Mitford, Noelle and Taylor. She says three court mages died in a ritual and Alteon banished three others. She remembers Taylor as a kind man blackmailed into service and thinks Victoria may seek him next. The research she later read concerned contacting the Queen of Monsters and creating a living vessel for a fragment of her, so that a Champion directly connected to her could be born. Old Wolf then directs the Hero to five research books and a commoner’s journal. Henry notices the Hero’s reluctance to share its contents and declines to pry.

Cold Thunder — Bill’s journal

Bill begins with the forbidden chamber and his recognition of the woman who has been made the Vessel. He believes family may explain why looking at her left him slowly dying rather than grotesquely distorted. Information extracted by pulling out the Slug’s underlings’ nails tells him that other witnesses suffer scrambled memories or bodily collapse. His original plan was to kill the boy who came from the Vessel and wait for his own illness to finish him. The boy’s resemblance to someone other than Dethrix or Queen Eleanor interrupts that intention. The journal gradually makes the relationship explicit: Ophelia is Bill’s sister, and Drakath is her son.

Bill tracks the bandit prince and hides the truth behind a plausible reason to train him. Drakath has little authority among his men, a weak stomach and poor swordplay; even his reaction to beetles reminds Bill of his sister. As the boy improves, the men begin following him without Bill’s supervision. Bill loses a finger protecting him from Alteon’s Knights and worries about his reckless revenge and the things he hears at night. Care grows through the work of keeping an exasperating child alive, without making Bill’s violence harmless.

The former nobles among the bandits give Bill an account of Dethrix’s parenting. Teachers were punished when Drakath learned too quickly; the king might draw a sword when the boy disappointed him, while court mages restrained the attack. Drakath nevertheless worshiped a father he saw only intermittently. Bill suspects that this cultivated dependence served the king’s intended purpose for him. The threat to make “it” produce a replacement leads Bill back to the Vessel. It is his reconstruction from testimony and observation, not direct access to Dethrix’s thoughts.

Ophelia’s life is recalled through the same uneasy mixture of love and shame. She kept trying to bring her bandit brother home while forcing herself forward through grand claims of genius and beauty that concealed despair and self-doubt. School, marriage to a merchant and an expected child seemed to offer a future. After losing the baby, she was cast out by a husband who wanted an heir and reduced to poverty. Bill thinks she was too ashamed to ask for his help, but that explanation remains his guess. By the time he found her, court mages had abducted her and others whose disappearance attracted little notice.

A later illness sends Bill back through what he remembers from interrogating a court mage. His numbered account says Dethrix made a bargain with a sealed being he calls Q-O-M. It needed someone directly connected to it to undo the seal; a summoned fragment therefore had to be housed in a living being naturally born in Lore. Bill records that the mortal Vessel severely limited the fragment’s power and thought, that only one Vessel succeeded and only Drakath was born alive, and that its mortal part fought when the child was taken. The Vessel was kept alive for possible reuse, draining mages and requiring prisoners. The journal’s account distinguishes the woman serving as Vessel from the child born through the project; it does not make Drakath that Vessel.

Bill hopes the spells sustaining Ophelia might save her son, apologizing for having fled and abandoned her. Then the crisis collapses into a bitterly comic false alarm: Drakath had the flu. Bill had panicked, struck the captured doctor and fed him to the dogs. The brutality remains in the same record as the tenderness. In his final entries, Bill can barely walk and looks at Drakath when he begins forgetting Ophelia’s face. He admits that being needed gratifies him, fears he will never share a good person’s afterlife, and hopes the boy will live long, make trouble and stay determined. The journal gives his attachment a history without absolving what he did.

Cold Thunder — A simple handshake

Beyond the books, the Hero and Henry find a burned, crushed fleshly form at the cellar’s far end, which the Hero identifies as a Vessel. Abandoned Cradle clears away the spiders and crystals surrounding it and requires an examination. Henry sees the Hero’s knees wobble and offers a rest before the noise of fighting interrupts them. The scene places the research’s human cost inside the castle rather than leaving it in the journal’s past. Henry’s concern marks the Hero’s reaction without explaining exactly what the examination revealed.

While the investigation unfolds, Muusa explains the dynastic history to Victoria and Lieber. The Alteons have distant blood ties to the Drakaths but would not have inherited their throne. Victoria sympathizes with Skye’s suffering while denying responsibility for Duncan’s invasion. Lieber asks why she still lives in a castle and wears a crown funded by stolen Skye wealth. Victoria answers that the nobles follow one of their own and that symbols sustain her authority. She promises a future visit to Iona, but says Greenguard’s present instability prevents it now.

Richard objects when Lieber moves toward the Queen, but Victoria permits a simple handshake. Their clasp is followed by her discovery that she cannot move. Lieber explains that direct contact lets him control the tiny electrical signals of a human nervous system, the one precise Energy trick at which he excels. He threatens to make Victoria bite out her tongue if anyone pursues them. Muusa sends Richard to find the Hero. What had looked like diplomatic deference becomes a means of taking the Queen hostage.

Cold Thunder — The hostage that Skye wants

Shockwaves brings the Hero back upstairs by the dumbwaiter to confront Skye’s warriors. Henry tries to secure the noncombatants as news of Victoria’s kidnapping spreads. Sleight of Hand has the Hero rescue seven nobles and find the Queen; Muusa’s warning is not to let Lieber touch them. The Warden turns away from the Hero in shame, his fists clenched against an accomplice he will not defy his mother to stop. Double Fianchetto requires confronting the controlled Queen, while Lieber threatens to stop her heart if attacked directly.

On the beach, Henry orders the Knights to damage the ships rather than engage directly. The Hero intervenes and warns that the arrows can erase a soul so completely that no ghost remains. The armored warrior’s voice is recognized as Indradeep, who stole Undine research with Iseul but also cared for Aria and the other patients. Lieber admits that they probably cannot defeat the Hero. Instead he threatens to drive an arrow into Victoria’s neck, claiming that returning without a valuable hostage would mean their own deaths. The danger is coercion backed by the Queen’s body, not a straightforward duel the Hero can settle by force.

Lieber offers an exchange: the Hero for Victoria, with a chance to investigate the Rumbling of Cold Thunder in Skye. That knowledge startles the Hero, and Celestia later worries that a spy has learned what Warlic’s barrier should conceal. Indradeep objects that this was not Iona’s plan. Celestia nevertheless volunteers to accompany the Hero, adding her influence and the concern of the dragons she raised to the value of the hostages. The Hero accepts. Lieber releases Victoria and takes the pair, warning against pursuit. Asked as Robina rather than as Queen what she wants, Victoria answers that she wants to save her friend.

Cold Thunder — The Queen of Victory

Back in the court, a rescue becomes the cause of a war. Lightning storms and miles of frozen sea obstruct the ready fleet. Miko offers the Isles’ ships and Zhoom the Sandsea’s blades. Victoria initially insists that this is a rescue mission, but Henry says Skye has already declared war through its actions. Granville wants to wipe it from the map; other nobles smell plunder, and Laidronette fears conscription. Henry silences the uproar only to demand the stern leadership that will save the Hero. Victoria orders departure by sundown and calls it war. Henry supplies the title the court takes up: Queen of Victory.

Richard reports that the Dragonlord Order will join after hearing of Celestia’s capture, while the Lightguard has not decided. Victoria intends to sail, leaving Tara responsible for the throne despite her renunciation and neutrality. Her stated purpose is to keep Tara away from Skye, where the Rumbling of Cold Thunder would draw her. Muusa will ask Warlic to help her. Victoria orders Richard to protect Tara and begins a conditional instruction to aim Sparagmos. Song interrupts: Skye contains innocent people who did not choose their ruler. Her question is who will save Victoria if she goes too far.

The companions’ responses remain divided by attachment and fear. Henry promises to fight at the front because the Hero saved him, even though he does not favor Victoria. Brentan intends to outrun the storms in his small ship, or swim if necessary; he wants to stop failing the people he cares for. Marigold turns to feeding Greenguard and keeping the Chaos research hidden from a rapacious court. Song fears Victoria could force her way into Undine and turn Sparagmos on Skye, yet still wants to believe the Queen and the Hero will keep their promises. Tara, meanwhile, says the unnatural storms have blocked her return to Termina and set forests alight. Her absence from the conference does not remove her from its consequences.

Nialla brings a final warning: Skye has contacted the Shadowscythe, and storm clouds spare the Empire’s fortress. Shakaz tells Gravelyn that the message calls for Greenguard to become a mass grave. Gravelyn does not give the expected attack order. She sends Shakaz to deliver a package secretly to Victoria, saying the Queen has a choice to make. The package’s contents and the decision it asks of her remain outside this scene. Balemorale ends with an imminent war and another private overture, rather than a settled alignment of every faction.

Cold Thunder — Smaller duties, revealing motives

Balemorale’s optional tasks let the summit’s tensions surface away from the throne. Celestia asks the Hero to make room when young Paladins crowd her companions and to spar with Skye’s warriors. Their Skye Knots are explained as symbols of supremacy, an interpretation she finds odd. Lieber’s Cold Reception instead asks that Knights and Paladins stop shoving his Elven guards; his Long Walk on the Beach turns to collecting deepsea pearls from Ashray sharks. Courtesy, prejudice and ordinary curiosity coexist in the same emissary’s requests.

Nialla’s Fisticuff Tourney breaks up Knights fighting for the honor of quarrelling nobles, while Local Seafare supplies lamprey for guests who have eaten more than she expected. Her work is hospitality under pressure, not military glory. Laidronette’s separate Security Plushies request sends the Hero for nightmare-resistant thread from Undine Shadowslayers. She makes enchanted toys for children near Darkovia, bringing the protection of ordinary subjects into a court where their interests are easily displaced.

Granville’s daily tasks expose a harsher ethic. In the native Unmended Scars request, he treats welcoming Skye as a mistake and asks the Hero to test its warriors under the cover of a friendly spar. His other task calls the old Alliance a source of weakness and sets the Hero to mentoring a hundred Knights and a hundred Paladins. Their lack of broken bones disappoints him; he remembers near-maiming in his own training with approval. The cached Unmended Scars description repeats Lieber’s defense of Elven guards, but that is not Granville’s native request. His completion still supplies the detail that the East’s ruler gives the eldest child the Warden’s title.

Astero requests Shadow Viscera samples and Necro Adipocere specimens from Undine. He recalls a composite Shadow tormenting humans, then contrasts its laughter with its own high-pitched screams and condemns Water Necromancy as profane flesh and fat given unlife. These lessons express his priorities and disgust rather than a neutral definition of every school of magic. Muusa’s parallel work takes a different approach: records and interviews may challenge the prejudices that make some practices ordinary in one country and intolerable in another.

Cold Thunder — Muusa’s records: whose history survives

Muusa serves as temporary Royal Lorekeeper for the summit, offering knowledge without making Victoria’s decisions for her. She asks whether a weapon that can erase souls should exist even if it might protect innocents, and sees Undine forcing powerful secluded Elves to show their loyalties. Her fourteen optional research quests begin at Balemorale but extend through later Skye destinations. Their findings belong to a continuing side itinerary, not proof that those regions’ main stories have already happened at the summit.

The Summer Castle record describes Balemorale as an old royal retreat later used by Dethrix’s court mages as a workshop and by Alteon as storage for Drakath heirlooms. Rumors of Duncan’s rituals with Morgana are presented as disputed. Interviews also complicate any simple equation between a dynasty and its treatment of nonhumans: Muusa says someone like her would have been excluded under Dethrix, Dudley listening to nonhuman subjects and Duncan employing Elven Knights and mages. The Lightguard record contrasts its ideal of vows independent of crowns with its new allegiance after the Shadow invasion, while the interviews note how many grieving veterans have been replaced by new recruits.

The Pureblood Skye record places Iona’s line among Camlan’s descendants while describing legal permission and social hostility toward mixed marriages as different things. Long Elven lives, difficulty conceiving with one another and shorter-lived Half-Elves are invoked to explain traditionalists’ fears of disappearance. Muusa’s interviews find Half-Elves excluded from the army and mistreated or abandoned by noble families. These accounts describe a hierarchy and its justifications; they do not endorse the supposed purity on which it rests.

Gaheris’s kingship begins with a complication: the first Champion of Energy was crowned posthumously. His descendants wrongly expected the title of Champion to pass by blood, and rumors blamed a loveless marriage when Haeos chose none of them. A later Champion from outside Skye was adopted and served King Taliesin. Executor accounts are sharply critical of the first king and favor Iseul over Iona; the native quest does not supply the cached account’s extra identification of Iseul as an adopted human child. The Bananach record then follows another outsider: a being that survived attempted destruction, was bound and cast into the sea, and found shelter with a Priestess after washing ashore. Its name passes to ravens whose punishment by Haeos makes them sensitive to suffering. Their identity remains unresolved.

Cold Thunder — Muusa’s records: a land’s long injuries

The Leanan Sidhe record describes inspiration purchased with the artist’s or hero’s life. Naoise and Duncan both rejected her violently, yet the account ends with both men dying in madness and the fairy having the last laugh. The Yew record places competing histories side by side. One celebrates Gaheris civilizing supposed savages; the other describes starving Elven refugees welcomed by the forest’s inhabitants before making themselves rulers. Muusa reads the bark as evidence of shelter answered with violence and asks whether she is really speaking only of trees. The contrast challenges the victors’ language without resolving every metaphor into a named person.

The Energy Element record names a Plane’s Champion, Titan and Great Dragon, while discussing the Avatar as another way the Plane touches Lore. Its interviews describe Haeos favoring Champions’ families over Volgritian and withhold the Titan’s identity, apart from a wish among some Elementals to replace it with one of their own. Muusa’s completion text stresses reciprocal influence: Elementals gain intelligence and power through prolonged contact with Lore as mortals draw on them. The record leaves those speakers’ hostility and withheld information visible rather than converting them into a complete cosmology.

The accounts of Naoise, Deirdre and Volgritian explain why Skye’s skies are empty in terms very different from a simple Dragon invasion. Deirdre came to repair relations, was captured and killed, and her displayed corpse lured Naoise into a trap. Surviving Dragons lost their wings. A later king demanded Volgritian as his mount after years of stolen gold and eggs; the Great Dragon killed him. Haeos then helped the next ruler seal Volgritian away, protecting his favored bloodline at the cost of the Dragon’s voice and respect. Muusa says the existing histories need correction because a sly victor wrote them.

Hero’s Daisy turns from rulers to the dead. Drawing on surviving Druid texts, it links the flowers of Skye’s battlefields to Eire, a child of the God of the Storms, and to the land mourning lives sacrificed regardless of allegiance. It compares that intimacy with Lore to old accounts of the Sandsea’s blue lotuses and oases. Energy Necromancy then describes a practice in which willing souls can answer and entrust their remains to another, while imprecision or coercion risks destroying them. Noxus’s dismissal of it as ventriloquism comes with advertising for his own school. Neither his sales pitch nor Astero’s disgust is treated as the last word on necromancy.

The Thundersnow record returns to Gaheris before kingship hardened into inheritance. The Lothians split from Camlan after his selection by Energy was treated as treason to Light. He found happiness with Glace, a Half-Elven Champion of Ice, and created spells joining snow and lightning in memory of their years together. After Glace’s shorter life ended, duty pushed him into a new marriage. His son Gareth later destroyed many of those spells in jealousy. The record surmises the final cruelty: a man who expected death to reunite him with Glace instead found his soul bound to the Plane of Energy. It presents that last emotional conclusion as an inference, not testimony from the dead.

Cold Thunder — The man in the middle

Man in the Middle breaks from the research project. Hybrid Elementals at Castle Gaheris carry the shockstones needed to open a sealed letter addressed to the Hero. Muusa identifies its signatories as the Hands of the Jus Divinum and warns that their interest is obsession rather than a simple grudge. Read as a later postscript, the letter addresses the Savior of Skye and celebrates the fall of Iona and the rise of the Queen of Victory. It cannot belong to the immediate moment before the voyage has occurred.

The writer claims that replacing Iona alone would never have broken Skye’s cycle and that taking Victoria would not have guaranteed the Hero’s involvement. Only this Hero, the letter insists, could make liberation lasting and turn Robina into the ruler Greenguard needs. It also draws attention to the convenience of Cold Thunder being in Skye. Rather than accept the title puppet master, the writer calls themself a parasite eager to live beneath the Hero’s skin, even welcoming destruction by the Hero as justice. The signature, the address to the Sovereign Eternal and the instruction to check the basement establish a threatening personal message; they do not independently prove every claimed manipulation or identify the author.